EDITORIAL: Time to get serious about inclusive education

People protest changes to the province's education system in Antigonish on Feb. 24. (AARON BESWICK / Staff)

The McNeil government was rightly held to account this week by parents of children with special educational needs and by disability rights activists for failing to put a strong legislative mandate for inclusive education into the bill that is radically changing the governance of the school system.

The former Education Act has had strong language directing elected school boards to provide inclusive education. It said they “shall develop and implement educational programs for students with special needs within regular instructional settings with their peers in age.”

In practice, the province and the boards never provided adequate funding, specialist educators and assessment services or classroom support staff to enable teachers to carry out this mandate properly. Teachers have been calling them out on this irresponsibility for years.

Some progress was finally made when the government appointed a commission last year to identify best practices and develop a strategic plan for inclusive education. The commission has already said the system is broken and needs sweeping reform. When the government responds to the commission’s final report, due at the end of this month, we’ll see if it is prepared to actually deliver inclusive education in a credible and responsible way.

Meanwhile, confidence that it will do the right thing on inclusion was only undermined when Bill 72 watered down the legislated mandate for inclusive schooling.

In the bill’s original form, there was no explicit mandate for inclusive education to replace the former directive to the now-abolished school boards. The new regional centres (the old school board offices that will now be run by the former superintendents without an elected board) were merely given a list of “objects.” These included providing education excellence and instruction for “all students enrolled in its schools and programs.” The minister has said this implied the inclusion of special needs.

Understandably, that didn’t satisfy concerned parents and educators. So the government did amend the bill, though it took two tries to do better. It first tried adding the language of the old school-board inclusion mandate to Bill 72’s list of “objects” of the regional centres. When critics said that was still legally weaker than the previous directive, it reinstated the word “shall” to, supposedly, clearly require the centres to develop inclusion programs.

What is being missed here, however, is that regional centres — unlike the disappearing school boards — have no independent capacity or authority to develop anything. They are completely and legally creatures of the minister of education. Their regional directors are department employees, appointed by the minister. They take their marching orders from the minister. So it is the minister who should be required by Bill 72 to develop and implement inclusion programs. The bill doesn’t do that.

The bill does not say the minister “shall” provide and implement inclusion education, though it does, rightly, say the minister “shall provide and implement programs and policies promoting the development” of both Mi’kmaq and African-Canadian education. Similar language should define the minister’s responsibility for inclusion, too — either now or when the inclusion report is implemented. The responsiblility should lie where all the power now lies.